TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021191/0211996.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.2 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 38

AMERICA ABROAD

The Villain's Advantage


By Strobe Talbott


    Amid the sirens and explosions, a puzzlement occurs. With
5.3 billion people on the planet, how can one of them cause so
much trouble for all the rest?

    What's more, this particular troublemaker seems a travesty
of the great-man theory of history and an insult to the modern
world's sense of itself. Just when we were getting serious
about the 21st century, along comes this atavistic menace. With
his 1930s brand of aggression and his medieval tirades, Saddam
Hussein has succeeded beyond his dreams and our nightmares in
tying our lives in knots. Even if he can't get us with his
Scuds, we're in range of his terrorist "commandos." And a
Saddam recession, if not depression, may be with us longer than
he will.

    There is nothing new in the phenomenon of a single audacious
individual grabbing humanity by the throat. But Alexander,
Caesar, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan and Napoleon all started near
the center of the world they set out to conquer. Not too long
ago, Saddam would have been a peripheral nuisance -- a pirate
or a warlord meriting the dispatch of an expeditionary force
from some imperial metropole.

    Part of what empowers Saddam is technology. Advanced
weaponry can be a great equalizer. Iraq is a Third World
country that was well on its way to acquiring a First World
arsenal.

    Driving Saddam's hardware is the most lethal software. He
is a master of 20th century totalitarianism. In Republic of
Fear, reissued last year by Pantheon, Samir al-Khalil argues
that Saddam's political forebears include not just Adolf Hitler
-- the precedent George Bush likes to stress -- but Joseph
Stalin as well. A corollary to the cult of personality is the
principle that everyone but the leader is expendable. In
addition to ensuring obedience, terror reminds the followers
that they are cannon fodder in the struggle ("the mother of
battles," as Saddam would have it) against all who oppose Numero
Uno. The state itself becomes an instrument for achieving his
goals, no matter how devastating to the interests of the
people.

    Hence, when it comes to getting their way and making their
mark, totalitarians have a perverse advantage over even the
most strong-willed democrats. At some point in their careers,
Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Lyndon Johnson and
Margaret Thatcher all unwillingly became private citizens
because their constituents decided it should be so. Ending
Hitler's chancellorship required a global conflagration.

    There is, in the annals of totalitarianism, one spectacular
anomaly -- the strange case of Mikhail Gorbachev. He drew on
the powers vested in him by the Stalinist system to liberate
the foreign satellites and liberalize the internal order of the
U.S.S.R. That was the miracle of Gorbachev I.

    Sadly, a totalitarian trait has survived in Gorbachev: the
delusion of his own indispensability. He could have been the
hero of Baltic independence and of reform in its triumph over
reaction. But that might have meant yielding to other,
democratically elected leaders. So now he is the villain. That
is the tragedy of Gorbachev II.

    Last week his new Foreign Minister, Alexander Bessmertnykh,
was at pains to deny that there is any backsliding in Soviet
support for the anti-Saddam coalition. Of course there is. The
more a state relies on repression at home, the more likely it
is to regard intimidation and invasion as the norm abroad.

    Totalitarianism often gets the jump on democracy when the
two clash. The leader of free people cannot move them to fight
except by persuasion and consensus. Hence movement is often
belated, after war has already started. So it was with the
entry of the U.S. into World War II, and so it was in the
present conflict, which began on Aug. 2, when Saddam attacked
Kuwait, not on Jan. 16, when the alliance finally struck back.

    Once the battle is joined, the ruthlessness gap continues
to favor the aggressor. A leader who will stop at nothing
tends, naturally, to go a long way against adversaries who
observe certain restraints and conventions of decency. The law
of the jungle is called that because the beastly threaten, by
their sheer beastliness, to prevail over the civilized. That
is why, as Saddam's neighbors await his next move, they don
their gas masks.

    The U.S. and its partners are trying to limit casualties in
their ranks and among civilians in Iraq, while Saddam boasts
of his willingness to lose tens of thousands of his own troops
in a single engagement, and deliberately targets cities. The
moral equivalent of his dumping oil into the Persian Gulf would
be poisoning the Tigris and Euphrates or tampering with the
dams at their headwaters. Yet both measures are out of the
question. By the same token, if Saddam had nuclear weapons, he
might very well use them; the U.S. does have nukes, but it will
never use them.

    That difference is the essence of why this war had to be
fought, why it must be won and why winning it will not be easy.